Wednesday, June 27, 2018

" Until he was past his mid-fifties and close to the age when most academics retire or have run out of steam, Lewis was a marginalized and even widely despised figure in British academia. His only serious academic work on the Middle East had been on the Tanzimat Reform program in Ottoman Turkey in the first half of the 19th century. A strong supporter of Israel, he does not appear to have set foot in any major Arab nation during at least the 30 years from 1950 to 1980. Nor did he seriously study or respect the work of those who did. His knowledge of the detailed political and economic developments in emergent Arab nations was nonexistent. He based his assessments of the region on travels there during the 1930s, well before World War II. When I studied Modern Middle East history at the London School of Economics in the mid-1970s, serious scholars of the region regarded him as a clown.

But after emigrating to the United States in 1974, Lewis found his real calling as a justifier and public ideologist for the forces of aggression and empire, much as Leo Strauss, the patron and founding father of the neoconservatives had done at the University of Chicago decades earlier.

In both cases, each man was able to escape the contempt that superficial and intolerant work had provoked in their original academic environments and they both played to the same eager-to-listen and willingly credulous audience."

and:

"Lewis, though he later tried to claim otherwise, was a central and extremely important figure in the relentless efforts after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as a justification for the US invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq.

“Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,” he memorably wrote about Arab societies.

The truth was precisely the opposite. Islamic extremism was only marginal throughout the Sunni Arab world before the Bush administration, urged on by Lewis and his fellow neocons, undertook their colossal project of pulverizing one stable society after another in the name of Lewis’s mythical “freedom.”

His incompetence and record of fraudulent claims and false prophecy were legion. In 2002, he claimed Iraqis would “rejoice” when the US armed forces invaded their country. The Iraqi popular insurrection that exhausted the US Army and took thousands of US lives took him completely by surprise."

I'm getting the strong impression that the goodies for Israel intended by President Jared to fuck over the Palestinians are keeping the Israelis relatively passive with respect to the latest Syrian campaign to de-terrorize the Syrian lands next to the Golan. Normally the kleptomaniac Khazars would be all over this, attempting to steal a 'buffer zone' in the fog of war. We're going to see an ultimatum from President Jared containing some kind of semi-permanent opening of the Rafah gate to Egypt, and some kind of adjacent economic development zone for Gazans in Egypt, some kind of weak 'right' of Palestinians to visit Al-Aqsa (the plan to put MbS in charge of the mosque, where he could completely surround it with a gold-plated casino/brothel/Trump hotel, seems to have been nixed by Jordan), and no right to a capital of the bantustans in East Jerusalem, in return for giving up absolutely everything else. The 'deal of the century' will be so outrageous that we have to expect a subsequent intifada which not even the corrupt PA will be able to quash, and the Israelis seem to be planning for it while not wanting to do anything which would derail the plans of President Jared to be Macher #1, which is keeping them relatively quiescent elsewhere.

"DOJ Won't Release Top Secret Loretta Lynch Intercepts Suggesting Secret Deal To Rig Clinton Probe" (Durden). It is amusing, and ironic, that the basis for this seems to be Russian documents hacked by the American IC. So American spying gives Americans access to their own documents which they weren't allowed to see by their own government (Barry), thanks to the fact that Russian spying uncovered them, with the Russian spying on America an unforgivable - up to the point of WWIII - assault on American democracy, and the American spying on Russia just business as usual.

The Clarification is that Americans are all assholes, and Trump is the best representation of the whole country, ever, and in fact the best possible representation of America and Americans, a sleazy, brutal, coarse huckster completely lacking in self-awareness (and the increasingly frenzied opposition to Trump is just a psychological inability to accept just how deeply rotten Americans all are): "Trump Isn’t The Problem, He’s the Manifestation of America’s Id" (Boardman).

"Moscow-Riyadh: Balancing Out Washington" (Korybko), Any long- or even medium-term plans that rest on the assumptions that 1) a Khazar-run political state will continue to exist in the Middle East, and 2) MbS and his family will continue to run Saudi Arabia, seem profoundly misguided. Of course, when everything goes sideways China will be around to pick up the pieces.

"Robert Nichols bounced around the country, Elliott said. He moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where he told his parents that he worked in the car industry. His sons visited him once, but he wouldn't let them stay with him, Phil Nichols said. Instead, his father put them up in a motel.

In March 1965, he wrote to his parents, telling them that he had moved to the northern California city of Richmond.

"Please do not worry about me,'' he said. "I am well and happy.''

That month, he mailed one last envelope to his son, Phil, from Napa, California. It contained just a penny, without a note. He never contacted his family again."

"Was Robert Ivan Nichols really the Zodiac Killer? Son doubts it, but internet won't quit". I wrote about this guy in 2005.

" Until he was past his mid-fifties and close to the age when most academics retire or have run out of steam, Lewis was a marginalized and even widely despised figure in British academia. His only serious academic work on the Middle East had been on the Tanzimat Reform program in Ottoman Turkey in the first half of the 19th century. A strong supporter of Israel, he does not appear to have set foot in any major Arab nation during at least the 30 years from 1950 to 1980. Nor did he seriously study or respect the work of those who did. His knowledge of the detailed political and economic developments in emergent Arab nations was nonexistent. He based his assessments of the region on travels there during the 1930s, well before World War II. When I studied Modern Middle East history at the London School of Economics in the mid-1970s, serious scholars of the region regarded him as a clown.

But after emigrating to the United States in 1974, Lewis found his real calling as a justifier and public ideologist for the forces of aggression and empire, much as Leo Strauss, the patron and founding father of the neoconservatives had done at the University of Chicago decades earlier.

In both cases, each man was able to escape the contempt that superficial and intolerant work had provoked in their original academic environments and they both played to the same eager-to-listen and willingly credulous audience."

and:

"Lewis, though he later tried to claim otherwise, was a central and extremely important figure in the relentless efforts after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as a justification for the US invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq.

“Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,” he memorably wrote about Arab societies.

The truth was precisely the opposite. Islamic extremism was only marginal throughout the Sunni Arab world before the Bush administration, urged on by Lewis and his fellow neocons, undertook their colossal project of pulverizing one stable society after another in the name of Lewis’s mythical “freedom.”

His incompetence and record of fraudulent claims and false prophecy were legion. In 2002, he claimed Iraqis would “rejoice” when the US armed forces invaded their country. The Iraqi popular insurrection that exhausted the US Army and took thousands of US lives took him completely by surprise."

I'm getting the strong impression that the goodies for Israel intended by President Jared to fuck over the Palestinians are keeping the Israelis relatively passive with respect to the latest Syrian campaign to de-terrorize the Syrian lands next to the Golan. Normally the kleptomaniac Khazars would be all over this, attempting to steal a 'buffer zone' in the fog of war. We're going to see an ultimatum from President Jared containing some kind of semi-permanent opening of the Rafah gate to Egypt, and some kind of adjacent economic development zone for Gazans in Egypt, some kind of weak 'right' of Palestinians to visit Al-Aqsa (the plan to put MbS in charge of the mosque, where he could completely surround it with a gold-plated casino/brothel/Trump hotel, seems to have been nixed by Jordan), and no right to a capital of the bantustans in East Jerusalem, in return for giving up absolutely everything else. The 'deal of the century' will be so outrageous that we have to expect a subsequent intifada which not even the corrupt PA will be able to quash, and the Israelis seem to be planning for it while not wanting to do anything which would derail the plans of President Jared to be Macher #1, which is keeping them relatively quiescent elsewhere.

"DOJ Won't Release Top Secret Loretta Lynch Intercepts Suggesting Secret Deal To Rig Clinton Probe" (Durden). It is amusing, and ironic, that the basis for this seems to be Russian documents hacked by the American IC. So American spying gives Americans access to their own documents which they weren't allowed to see by their own government (Barry), thanks to the fact that Russian spying uncovered them, with the Russian spying on America an unforgivable - up to the point of WWIII - assault on American democracy, and the American spying on Russia just business as usual.

The Clarification is that Americans are all assholes, and Trump is the best representation of the whole country, ever, and in fact the best possible representation of America and Americans, a sleazy, brutal, coarse huckster completely lacking in self-awareness (and the increasingly frenzied opposition to Trump is just a psychological inability to accept just how deeply rotten Americans all are): "Trump Isn’t The Problem, He’s the Manifestation of America’s Id" (Boardman).

"Moscow-Riyadh: Balancing Out Washington" (Korybko), Any long- or even medium-term plans that rest on the assumptions that 1) a Khazar-run political state will continue to exist in the Middle East, and 2) MbS and his family will continue to run Saudi Arabia, seem profoundly misguided. Of course, when everything goes sideways China will be around to pick up the pieces.

"Robert Nichols bounced around the country, Elliott said. He moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where he told his parents that he worked in the car industry. His sons visited him once, but he wouldn't let them stay with him, Phil Nichols said. Instead, his father put them up in a motel.

In March 1965, he wrote to his parents, telling them that he had moved to the northern California city of Richmond.

"Please do not worry about me,'' he said. "I am well and happy.''

That month, he mailed one last envelope to his son, Phil, from Napa, California. It contained just a penny, without a note. He never contacted his family again."

"Was Robert Ivan Nichols really the Zodiac Killer? Son doubts it, but internet won't quit". I wrote about this guy in 2005.